Case Study: Owlias

Owlias is one of the
mobile apps designed and developed internally by MobiDev, currently
available on Apple App Store free of charge. Owlias started as our
internal initiative, the interest in replacing a board game with a
beautiful and fun application. At the time we had a couple of free
team members and an idea to work on. Why not, thought we.

The game is about
explaining words without naming them. A number of people divide into
teams. While one player has to explain a word, other players of their
team must guess it. And so it goes in turns. The app significantly
simplifies the process of playing, if compared to the original board
game. You don't need any bulky playing sets. You don't need countless
cards with words. All of it is in your pocket – just launch the
little app on your device any time of day and night.

We also wanted an
authentic visual image associated with the game. Simply porting a
board game to a smartphone without any visual identity just didn't
cut it. The designer was given full freedom, and that's what the app
started with: investigation as for similar products, research on
goals, tasks, and target audience, writing user cases, creating
wireframes, creating the central character – up to the ready design
and preparations to implementation.

TARGET AUDIENCE

The app is created for
everyone who loves this game and simply wants to have fun with
friends. With one side note: Owlias is currently available in English
and Russian languages.

It's absolutely free;
although it could be monetized with adding new categories of words
which could be released with updates, to make the game even more
interesting and fascinating.

FEATURES

This app is a great way
not only to have fun, but as well to keep the vocabulary and speaking
skills in good shape. There are no same cards and same words. Players
don't play same games twice and never get bored.

• There's a total of
6,000 words in English language, and another 6,000 in Russian. Not
infinite, but in terms of the game rather close;

• A maximum of 10 teams
(usually from 4 to 20 players can be involved);

• Three levels of
difficulty (affects the complexity of words taken from the
dictionaries);

• Showing lists of
guessed/missed words at the end of each turn;

• Keeping the score.

APPLIED TECHNOLOGIES

• Custom UI

• Core Graphics

• Core Media

• FXBlurView

• GPU Image

• POP

• Flurry

No back end was required
for this app.

RESULTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

The result is a smooth
and beautiful application. There was only one vaguely
troublesome moment along the way. We had to look for the best
dictionaries and check them out thoroughly. But it was a matter of
time, nothing more.

Probably most of all we
are proud of the visual design. Not only is it recognizable, it's
cleverly constructed. There must be nothing to distract players
during the game: there's just a word to guess and the stopwatch in
the corner of the screen. And all around there are beautiful
animations and a cool character to associate the app with.